Troublemaker: Chat with Checker Finn, March 5


With all the irony, implicit and explicit, I will be proctoring a test Wednesday.

You, however, would be well advised to tune into this discussion described below:

This Week’s Live Chat

Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik
When: Wednesday, March 5, 2 p.m., Eastern time
Submit questions in advance.

Please join us for this online chat to get an insider’s view of school-reform movements over the past five decades.

In a new book titled Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik, Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, provides a close-up history of postwar education reform and his own role in it. Mr. Finn, assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, and an aide to politicians as different as Richard Nixon and Daniel Moynihan, recounts how his own experiences have shaped his changing and often contentious views of educational improvement efforts, from school choice to standards-based education to the professionalization of teaching.

For background, please read:
“Lessons Learned: A Self-Styled ‘Troublemaker’ Shares Wisdom Gleaned From 57 Years in Education,” Education Week, February 27, 2008.

[Here’s a version that doesn’t require a subscription.]

About the guest:

• Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, senior fellow at Stanford‘s Hoover Institution, and senior editor of Education Next. He is the author of We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future and many other books.

Submit questions in advance.

No special equipment other than Internet access is needed to participate in this text-based chat. A transcript will be posted shortly after the completion of the chat.

Finn is one of those guys whose views you may not always like, with whom you may not always agree, but to whom you must listen, because you will always learn something from him.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Education, Education assessment, Education quality, Education reform, Public education, Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to Troublemaker: Chat with Checker Finn, March 5

  1. Eric Kurtz's avatar Eric Kurtz says:
    April 20, 2008 at 3:38 pm

    I’m hoping to find Checker Finn’s email address. My partner Dick and I were with him and Rainu on a recent tour of Burma, Laos, and Thailand.

    Could you forward this email to him?

    Thanks!

    Eric Kurtz
    ewk@alum.mit.edu

    Like

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